During a PLM process of a product line, various decisions are required to be made. These decisions may be made according to many aspects, such as, regulatory requirements, technologies and business processes of the product line. Any decision made in view any one of the aspects may result in a requirement of making another decision relating to another aspect. Consequently, a decision making process may impose a number of changes in the PLM process across the aspects. Shrinking Time To Market (TTM), increasing competition and fast changing technology has added more venerability to the PLM process by entailing often changes in the process. In such situations, it is desirable to have a system and a process for PLM that may quickly adapt to the changes made across different aspects of the PLM process and provide a robust solution.
Existing PLM processes and systems generally provide a framework that may provide a solution for an aspect of the PLM process. However, determining the effect of the solution provided by the framework on other aspects, and obtaining a complete PLM process has remained a job of a skilled person. In spite of or because of, involvement of the skilled person chances of achieving a foolproof PLM process/system are considerably low. For example, in an implementation the PLM maps may be drawn by technical architects, thus mapping of the product components may become dependent on individual expertise which may result in failures when such expertise are not available. Further because of increasing complexities of decision making process of different aspects and their integration issues with one another, accomplishment of the PLM process/system has become more time consuming and expensive affair.
Further, with the existing PLM processes, where inherent traceability of different aspects may not be made available, implementation of changes in the PLM may become complicated. Also existing PLM processes do not provide an end to end solution from conceptualization of a product till the end of life of the product. Therefore transferring knowledge from one adaptation of the product to another becomes difficult.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.